Twas the night before screening

It was a small and huddled group we drove by on our way in to the stadium Tuesday evening.  8:30 pm, and already hopeful people were lined up in preparation for the screening tomorrow...prepared to wait all night outside the gate on the chance that they would get to see a doctor in the morning.

Maaike and I had sent over a backboard saran-wrapped full of medical supplies earlier that afternoon, named it Frank, and prayed that things would stay calm and Frank would not be needed.  Volunteer security from the ship, together with local gendarme, had been securing the gates since 2 pm and keeping people under control.  Maaike and I were the medical advance team - the two nurses on site overnight to talk to potential patients and redirect some of the people we would not be able to help.  I stashed a bottle of hand sanitizer in my back pocket along with a good flashlight, put on my headlamp, and we walked out to the group waiting outside - stopping just inside the gate to pray for a safe and secure night, for healing, for strength and wisdom.

Maaike talking with a potential patient



Dennis

I don't know how many we saw that night.  Hundreds came for information on eye and dental screenings, hundreds more hopeful for a chance at life.  One of the local gendarme volunteered to join our team, and stayed with me most of the night translating my words into Ewe.  We screened the group already there, and over a hundred with facial tumors, hernias, burn contractures, and children with cleft lips settled down to stay the night.  Around three, after a long break while our patients slept, we continued to screen as new people flooded in to fill the line and stretch it out along the wall and down the road until the end was out of sight.  Dennis, one of the mechanics from ship, was one of my guardian angels through the night - an intimidatingly solid wall of man who reassured me "I've got your back," and who stayed with me during the long hours of screening.

Waezooonh, you are welcome. My smile and quiet introduction were answered with a shy yooooo and story after story of heartache, inability to work, rejection. I looked at CT and Xray films by flashlight, and examined lumps and bumps and contractures and hernias and wounds by headlamp. I forgot how badly I needed to pee, and wished with all my heart I could speak enough Ewe or French to personally encourage them with a yes, please stay in line, this is a surgery we can do! or to voice my own regret beyond a simple Je suis désolé, monsieur as the translator explained my words. There were too many we could not help...we had no orthopedic surgeon or neurologist or urologist or facilities for purely medical care. We cannot remove a brain tumor or fix sciatica and infertility. And there are limited spots for the hernias that seem so prevalent here in Togo. Conditions that could be treatable almost anywhere else in the world can instead be a life sentence...or a death sentence. Life is not fair.

Lines of people waiting to be seen

Even as I examined these people and loved them regardless of their surgical status, so much more I know Jesus was there with me, walking among the crowds and loving them.  Jesus is not limited by surgery slots or what doctors and facilities we have available.  For some, maybe healing started that night with a kind word, a welcome, a handshake...or maybe healing came with a miraculous release from pain and deformity.  I may never know the end of their story, but I pray that night they saw the heart of God.


Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness.  When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.  Then he said to his disciples, 'The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.' - Matthew 9: 35-38


By the time the screening ended the following afternoon, at least 4,000 people had been initially screened, with 1,600 passed through to the medical pre-screeners inside, and almost 500 scheduled for surgery or further testing.  Praise God for a safe and successful screening!


Below are a few still shots and some video footage from screening day...a few of the patients featured are already recovering from surgery or home and healed!

to keep a quiet heart

It's been a busy busy two weeks, and it promises to continue as we gear up for our first day of surgery for this outreach, tomorrow.  Our nursing team has moved from orientation to putting on a wildly fun hospital open house for the crew; from a full-blown mock hospital evacuation to screening thousands of patients at a sports stadium, all in a week.  Amazing...successful...utterly exhausting.  Each time I sit down to start a blog post I end up closing the computer, taking my headphones out of my ears, and falling asleep long before 10 pm.  After testing the evacuation stretchers to trial a few ways to secure a ventilated patient, a few thoughtful friends threatened to strap me into one and haul me down the hallways back to bed if I didn't go get some sleep.

Melisa volunteered to be our initial victim for
stretcher-testing before the evacuation drill.
Although firmly secured with a good airway
 (mock-intubated), she could not see much
of what went on.

When this involved being carried up and
down the stairs blind, we definitely
challenged how much she was willing to trust
us!  If you ever find me strapped
into an evac stretcher sleeping, I blame Melisa.

In a momentarily peaceful moment last weekend, I spent time in the warm sun looking out over the water from deck 8 and reflecting on life.  The view is the same as when we were here in 2010, with the whole of the navy on one side and the bustling port on the other.  The ship is mostly the same, but with constantly new and different crew finding their way around with life and excitement and vision.  To them the wards are empty, full of promise and potential.

As I look into the ward, I don't always see the smoothly tucked blankets over the empty beds or the beautifully clean floor sparkling in the light.  I don't see the new ventilators and monitors by the ICU bedside, or my own hands full of freshly revised paperwork.

Instead there are still faces and memories everywhere - some filled with wonder and reflection on the goodness of God, many with laughter and dancing and incredible stories of healing.  And some, as I uncover them, are still a little raw and tender with sorrow.

Here in Togo I first saw things happen that weren't medically possible and watched in wonder as we prayed and an arterial bleed stopped underneath my hands.  It was here that I realized physical healing was useless unless the soul healed as well and began to hope again.  Here I saw people who owned nothing and still had everything.  Here I helplessly cuddled a dying baby as he began to slip away in my arms, and I asked God why.  It was here I realized that I can't have all the answers and, as difficult as it was, resolved to surrender.

I'm excited for this outreach in Togo.  Tomorrow the wards will start to fill with patients again, scared and full of an unfamiliar hope.  Tomorrow our nurses get to be nurses again, and we get to be a small part of God at work in healing lives and faces and bodies and souls.  God is already at work, and I can't wait to see what he is going to do!

My prayer for this outreach reflects that of George Dawson, who begged for heavenly vision and a heart full of trust.  I, too would ask to see through God's eyes - to see more than just the physical deformity and need, and to see more than the pain and difficulties of this life.  I would ask for a quiet heart, constantly trusting in the Lord who promises to carry me, even when I can't see.

O Lord our governor, we beseech Thee, of Thy mercy,

That we may have the heavenly vision,

And behold things as they seem unto Thee.

That the turmoil of this world may be seen by us

To be bringing forth the sweet peace of the eternal years,

And that in all the troubles and sorrows or our own hearts

We may behold good, and so, with quiet mind

And inward peace, careless of outward storm,

We may do the duty of life which brings to us

A quiet heart, ever trusting in Thee.

~ George Dawson

A life worthy

"Put your Bible on your head to show how much you love Jesus...everyone must daaance!"

If I heard that coming from any western worship leader, I would be a little shocked, to say the least.  Here, most of the congregation yelled enthusiastically in response, and put everything from Bibles to purses and large rocks on their heads.  I retrieved my Bible out of my purse and looked at it a little uncertainly.  Up until now the worship style had involved a lot of hallelujahs and amens and foot stomping and arm swinging and butt shaking.  I wasn't sure my Bible would stay on my head through all of that.

It's been almost two years since I've been to the fishing village church.  My fond memories involved beach chairs, a wooden-pole church without walls, a few goats wandering through the non-road, and a lot of sand.  We've progressed to bare concrete walls with a variety of holes (ventilation?), wooden benches, and rubber hoses hanging through the ceiling at strategic spots.  The children were just as friendly as ever, willing to enthusiastically greet us and explore hairstyles, watches, water bottles, and Bibles as a variety of service entertainment.  As I tried to communicate with them, my words came out in a jumble of Ewe and Krio and French and Indonesian and English, with a little pantomime thrown in for good measure. 

And so we sang in Ewe, and I sang along in my jumble of languages; and we danced to the shekere and drums, along the aisles and in the front of the church and next to our bench seats. And the Bible stayed on (mostly) through the end of worship.  The sermon was on unity, but a section from the main text reached out off the pages and into my heart.

As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Eph 4:1-2

Right now the calling is surgical wards aboard a little white hospital ship: faces and legs and hands and eyes and lives and souls. The calling is training nurses with humility and gentleness and patience, reaching out to the needy, being the face and hands and heart of Christ.  The calling is to live a life of radical love.

And a life worthy of that calling would be dancing, dancing...sometimes with a Bible on my head, and sometimes with a baby drooling down my back, and sometimes with tears running down my face.  A life worthy of this trust would indeed be a wild and radical and difficult and wonderful life.  Lord, give me the strength and the patience and joy to live a life worthy of this calling.  To live with only You as the audience, as Your love saturates until it spills out of the cracks and overflows uncontrollably into life...

Urban airport camping

My day started yesterday at 4 pm and stretched out and out through an extra 7 hours of time change backwards and oozed into the little holes on the long benches of the Accra arrivals area.  I tossed and turned for a while, hoping the holes wouldn’t be permanently imprinted on my hip, and wondered at the intensity of the animatedly loud and heated conversation of the 20 people apparently upset at the vending machine to my right.  On the next bench over, an airline worker is stretched out napping, with his bright yellow neon and retro-reflective vest crumpled over his chest.  Another conversation at the bottom of my bench seems to inspire a lot of gesticulating and bench-banging, and my I-pod music is almost completely drowned out despite the headphones as my makeshift bed rattles and shakes with the conversation’s punctuation.

My amazing campsite, complete with bedding

For reasons that all seemed very good and logical at the time, I’ll be spending the better part of a day in the Ghana airport.  And by better, I mean pretty much all.  The movie The Terminal has never been a completely far-fetched oddity for me – I have lived it in pieces, over and over again, sleeping on benches and floors and wandering in shops and washing my hair in the bathroom sink at 3 am when the whole airport belongs to me.  Although I have to say, a 23-hour layover is one of the longest I can claim to date.  It’s only been 5 hours so far, and already I’ve met an amazing amount of people, from the friendly Egyptian engineer behind me in the looooong immigration line, to one of our Togolese translators who came over to say hi when he simultaneously recognized me and my flamboyantly orange Mercy Ships water-bottle, to a little brown girl who shyly wandered over when I forgot I was in West Africa and waved at her.   Here, a side-to-side wave means a friendly hello, while a down-wards wave means “come here.”  Just as I was starting to get back into Indonesian mannerisms…time to remember the African ones again!

All in all – it may shape up to be a relatively comfortable layover.  After all, the benches don’t have intermittent armrests, so far no one is smoking indoors, and the baggage people thoughtfully agreed to keep my checked bag (although it could have made a very comfy pillow).  The only main problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a bathroom in this particular part of the airport.  Maybe I’ll walk over to Departures to find one…just in case I need to wash my hair tonight.

Explore

These last few weeks it’s been a blessing to explore Indonesia again.  To hike the volcanoes and rainforests with my brothers and sisters and friends.  To see my world as it was when I was 10, and 15, and 17, and now again through fresh eyes; to enjoy the tastes and sounds and sights and smells with a new sense of wonder.

Just after Christmas we headed down as a family to meet friends for a few days of vacation in a little villa by the ocean.  The sunsets are just as majestically colorful as I remembered, dotted here and there with the black kites of hopeful bat fishermen.  If I listen hard enough I can hear the peaceful twilight of 10 years ago shattered by high-pitched shrieks on the night the bat fishermen brought down a fruit bat tangled in the hooks and broken glass along the kite strings, piled sand on the majestic 6-foot wings, and grilled the bat meat over a driftwood fire on the beach.  If I squint I can see the “tribe” children I grew up with building sand forts on the beach, and my mother and aunt coming back from a walk with their hands full of sand dollars.  If I walk a mile or two, I can find the place I learned that driving a motorcycle along the rice paddies and down unpaved roads can be dangerous.   A few things have changed since the tsunami in 2006 – restaurants missing, and tsunami evacuation route signs everywhere, but the wide stretch of ocean is unchanged.

 

One of my favorite adventures is fast becoming a popular tourist attraction.  A river runs through Green Canyon to the sea, banks filled to overflowing from the constant rain and overhung with dripping vines dangling from the canopy above.  The real fun begins after a short boat ride upriver to a small waterfall.  We’ve done it before – the swim against the current, pulling ourselves up hand over hand and climbing over rocks to try and reach the source, only to ride the rapids back down to the beginning.  This time the river was high and our guides cautious, and we didn’t make it up as far as we had hoped.  But it was still gorgeous and wet and green and amazingly fun.

A day later we wound our way through the buses of Indonesian tourists to the forest preserve for a hike along trails well off of the marked routes.  I’m pretty sure it’s not just called rainforest because of the precipitation frequency.  The other reason became immediately clear only 30 minutes into our hike through the caves and up to a cliff top overlooking the ocean.  Sweat dripped down my face, into the tank top and bathing suit underneath, and soaking into the backpack straps.  It really wasn’t that hot – a cloudily cool day to hike through the teak and rattan and up across quietly bubbling streambeds.  There was simply nowhere else for the sweat to go in an atmosphere almost 100% saturated with water already.

 

Just looking down at the ground I could have believed I was on a hike in Northern Pennsylvania.  Leaves and dirt and mold and roots often look the same anywhere.  It was the little things that gave it away: the brightly colored tree frog watching us pass, the large ant nest on a branch above, the thick vines and soaring green treetops and breathtaking view from a small pool we swam in at the top of the cliff.  It was the rafflesia blossoms and buds sprouting out along the ground and decaying fallen trees.  It was the monkeys cautiously watching us from the brush, and the young teak leaves we crushed to try as lipstick.  It was the scattered openings of limestone caves hollowed out in the hillsides by chisel during the Japanese occupation in 1942, waiting to be explored by headlamp.  

All photos are borrowed from siblings and friends who carry their cameras much more often than I do :-)

I'll be home for Christmas

There are some that dream and sing of a white Christmas, of fires and sleighs and hot chocolate.  My Christmas this year involved none of these.  And yet, I am home.

Gamelan music blares from a mosque loudspeaker, echoing across the rice fields and red tile roofs and banana trees to the white tile-and-concrete open porch on top of our house.   The street sellers call out advertising their wares, and we can hear neighborhood conversations and passing motorcycles as clearly as if they were in the house with us.  The clouds announce rain soon, as they have almost every day, and promise a glorious show for tonight – colorful tropical sunset drowning behind the mountains in the maghrib call to prayer.  These last two weeks our family has been together in a country we moved to over 18 years ago, where I haven’t visited in a long time and my sisters-in-law are getting to experience for the first time.

It’s been six years since I’ve been to Indonesia.  I flew into Jakarta in darkness, blind to the scattered green-blue of the islands and ocean below.  I approached the immigration desk in the Jakarta airport ready to fall back on English if I needed, and found myself chatting casually with the officials in fluent Indonesian as passing tourists shot me strange glances out of the corners of their eyes.  I don’t look like someone who is coming home.  My white skin and blond hair bleached lighter by the African sun stand out among the creamy brown skin and black hair of everyone else.  I am at least a foot taller than every Indonesian woman in the airport.  And yet, the language and culture, even the accent, have come back easily from somewhere I had stored them away after high school.  In another week I’ll store them back again, in a rattan and batik treasure chest in the back of my brain, and pull out the bright and flamboyant bits of Togolese culture and gutteral Ewe I’ve learned so far.

I told Immigration I was pulang kampung (returning home to my village for a visit).  It’s been more true than they could have guessed, and than I could have known.  This time has been an amazing mish-mash of time with family, classic Indonesian-style adventures, incredible food that always somehow seems to involve white rice and coconut milk and ginger, childhood memories, and soaking in the beauty of the island.  Even as my definitions of home shift and shift again and I realize I may never again be able to call Java home, I can say with full confidence that it is good to be home for Christmas.

Christmas adventures in Accra

Noel and Justin point out the goudge our tro-tro
left in the road

 We had initially planned to go somewhere else entirely.  It was meant to be a leisurely lunch with friends, followed up with a traipsing adventure through downtown Accra, hitting up all the interesting cultural and historical landmarks we could manage in an afternoon. 

Instead of following the original plan, we ended up skipping lunch at the mall and embarking instead on a lively outing involving a palace, a broken axel, plenty of yummy Ghanian snacks, and Colin Powell. 

I started out with a rather large group of Mercyshippers, enjoying the fresh(er) air and relative cleanliness of Tema port as we hiked out from our slip to the nearest taxi station.  It was my first time in Ghana, and I felt like I had walked out into my own world.  The architecture, traffic patterns and weather...everything down to the painted curbs along the sidewalk and brightly lit advertisements for Indomie...it all reminded me of Indonesia in a rather African way. 

 

Our tro-tro, shortly before we started walking


Surreal...to the point I almost started speaking Indonesian multiple times.  But it also meant I felt totally at home when our taxi went a different way from the other taxis and left five of us on the brink of adventure.  We flagged down a tro-tro (strangely reminiscent of the angkots and tok-toks of my childhood, and the bush taxis and poda-podas of more recent African adventures) and crammed in with twenty strangers, only to find ourselves on the curb two hours later after a loud noise and grinding sideways halt.  Thankfully, the wheel and axel decided to come off while we were turning rather than while driving fast.



Jamestown Palace



When we found out we had gone well past the intended stop because our tro-tro had taken an entirely different route, we set off walking instead, following a rather battered and damp sketch of the Accra waterfront.  We passed Independence Arch and Kwame Nkrumah's grave, two forts and a palace on our way down to the Jamestown lighthouse.  Lively haggling got us a tour of the "palace" - a concrete building with cultural murals along the walls - and a trip to the top of the lighthouse.  Through the haze we could see an old slave castle a few miles away (to be visited another time).  The view was also filled with fishing boats along the waterline and anchored just off shore; inland there were concrete offices and tiny huts and children playing in the streets.

 

Fishing boats, with Osu castle in the
distance



Heather, Noel, Michelle and I...with Colin Powell



Later that afternoon we stopped at a local craft market (mainly to look at fabric), and as we were waiting for one last friend to finish, we met a man who proudly named the capitols of our respective countries and states, and then delivered quite a lot of commentary on the development of Canadian territories.  I'm not sure if Colin Powell was his real name or just one he's chosen to adopt, but along with significant potential as a future geography teacher, Colin does some excellent woodcarving.

We made it back to ship just after dark - tired, dirty, and full of fun, and were greeted at the gangway by lights and wreaths and a ship-style Christmas decor.  It's not snow and hot chocolate and pepperment and pine, but somehow it's starting to feel a lot like Christmas. :-)